


Vampyr

by Starships



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AU, F/M, Oneshot, Romance, vampire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 20:40:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2665625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starships/pseuds/Starships
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Ten was a vampire and Rose was still Rose, but Ten also liked to sneak in and do her homework for her. </p>
<p>Another AU love story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vampyr

An eon’s worth of dust has long since settled, thick under her fingers like a layer of tiramisu. She doesn’t care, sliding a nail gleaming with aquamarine laquer right into it, the grit soft under her skin. Impatiently, she flicks it onto the ancient floor below her and tries not to cough.

  
_Books of the Bandersnatch._ The store is old, and the title inappropriate, Rose thinks. She does not feel like Alice.  
But this singular book, in particular…

  
Heady leather, peeling at the edges like a well-done piecrust does in the middle. Smooth under her, the gilded shine of the title is a raised scar across the front. She thinks about the letters being printed, certainly at least a hundred years ago for the weight of this book and the wear of its visage. She gingerly opens the cover, and the spine creaks, and more dust falls.

  
Vampyr.

  
Glancing hastily around, she slides the tomb into her bookbag, slung casually over her shoulder. It’s weight across her body seems greater than it did in her hands, but she pays little mind and selects a magazine from the rack behind her to buy, glossy and slick in her hands, the title unnoticed.

  
The elderly proprietor whose feet have worn grooves through the aisles of Books of the Bandersnatch says nothing, and takes her money for the magazine, making small talk about the overcast weather and the sprinkle of cold rain threatening the end of summer in early August.

  
Wilfred pats her hand as she moves to leave, gnarled skin like a tree reaching out to protect her unblemished knuckles.

  
“Don’t let that man steal your heart, y’hear?”

  
Rose blushes and grins sheepishly, guilt trickling through her stomach like it always does when she steals from someone she learns anything about.

  
“Riiight!” she teases lightly. “I can’t even make it through history class, much less a chap’s brain.”

  
“Maybe he’ll make it through yours,” he returns grimly, suddenly as serious as the threat of rain.

  
Rose feels a shiver of electricity up her spine, and like when she was twelve and snuck into a horror film, she suddenly has to get out of there. But the old man’s eyes pin her, and she stays, listens.

  
“That book is yours, you know. Always has been. I thought it was just waiting for a pretty young thing, but no. You. Girls I thought he’d like kept skipping past, never seeing it. But you touched its cover, opened it, took it off the shelf. You’re Arthur, girl. But you’re not going to be king.”

  
Rose’s eyes are wide, fingers shaking a little. Was she caught? She stamps down the niggling feeling that being caught is now the least of her worries.

  
Her bag pulls her harder to the earth, seeming even heavier.

  
“Don’t fall in love with him. He’ll eat you alive, and you’ll die.”

  
The musty air, glittering with dust, is threatening to choke her down. She is scared of this stranger.

  
Time to go.

  
With every ounce of strength she has, she spins on the ball of her foot and flees, the bell on the door ringing cheerfully, only sounding like a clap of thunder in the distance to Rose.

  
She runs all the way to the estate, more than a few kilometers, trainers pounding onto the pavement and the weight of the book pulling on her spine every time her feet hit the ground.

  
The rain falls.

 

 

The cotton is restless above her, below her, around her. Polka dot pajamas are as choking as the duvet above her and the sheets that stick to every bead of sweat from every pore as she sleeps.

  
She feels his tongue dip into the hollow of her throat to taste her, but to her, it is a filament of a dream.

  
He lies beside her, fingers flexed like a cage around her wrist while she is hours away from waking. He does not touch her, save for his mouth. Every inch of him hovers, breathless and still, a dance of waiting for her to bolt awake and knowing with supernatural certainty that she won’t.

  
He has all the time in the world.

 

 

The first time she wakes and he is there, the moon is riding high like a guard’s torch, she is slick with a cold, shivering sweat from her dream, and he is doing her math homework.

  
“Um,” she says.

Somewhat startled, he turns around to stare at her. His hair, she notes, appears to be equally startled.

“You shouldn’t be awake,” he declares.

“Me! You’re in my room!”

“Certainly, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be awake, simply that—“

“Who th’hell are you?”

“Ah,” he says, standing swiftly from her desk with a grace that has her sitting up quickly and clutching the covers to her chest. His hair, the glasses, the homework, the absurdity of the situation had her feeling—but no. The hairs on the back of her neck recognize him: predator.

“I’m a lot of things,” he says, dark and low. He is walking, very slowly and deliberately, towards her bed. “I’m a hunter and a healer, a thief and broken man.”

“You’re a bit dramatic.”

He ignores her, and traces a long and knobby index finger along the book she had fallen asleep reading. Page three hundred and eighty-two. Vampyr.

Startled, she stares into his eyes. They don’t bespell her. “You are not!”

He looks indignant. “Am so!”

“Nuh uh!”

“Yes huh!”

“But you’re wearing _Chucks._ ”

He steps back and considers her a moment. Genuine puzzle crosses his face, creasing his forehead slightly. She wants to smooth those lines out, like clay.

“Would Chucks stop you from loving me, Rose Tyler?”

The question is beyond ridiculous, the air in the room absurd, and she tries very hard to not giggle. But his eyes are serious, impossibly so dark they are ebony, and according to chapter seven, that means he hasn’t fed.

She feels a bit like Alice, now.

Without knowing why, a most honest answer bubbles out of her mouth.

“No.”

He is closer. She didn’t see him move. “Say it, Rose.”

She won’t. Instead, she tries to speak through the smell of him, spicy sweet like cider in the depths of winter, coils of smoke, iron and hemoglobin and erythrocytes. “I never told you my name.”

Still, closer. God, she could choke on the smell of him, drink him deep until its all she knows. How does she feel like this? A lunatic in her room doing her math and now he’s so close, so—

He sweeps his tongue over the pulse in her throat, and speaks into her skin, the vibration traveling to her own voice box: “I can hear your mind,” he purrs. “I can pull your name from you like taffy.”

“….Banana taffy?” she asks weakly, through his stifling presence.

He pauses around her, not touching her except for the slick slide of his mouth, she notices. Suddenly, he is roaring with laughing above her.

“Bananas!” he shouts. She is worried she will have to explain a lunatic by the light of the moon to her mum. He gazes down at her, eyes rich with affection.

“Oh, I like you,” he says thickly. “Don’t forget to show your work for number twenty-four.”

“What?” she asks, dizzy with him.

But he’s already gone, and she hadn’t even blinked.

 

 

It’s over chips, the next time. He just sits down and takes one while she’s still dotting them with too much vinegar.

“I’m the Doctor,” he says cheerfully around half-chewed potato.

“No,” she says, determined not to let him unsettle her again, “you’re a vampire.”

“Nope! _The_ Doctor, thankyouverymuch. Not just _a_ anything.”

“Only The will do, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Fine. But you owe me another basket of chips.”

He smirks. “Deal.”

“And what do I owe you?” she asks, heart pitter-pattering just a little faster, and she hopes he doesn’t hear but knows he probably does.

“You owe me nothing, Rose Tyler.”

The shiver down her spine does not let her forget what he is. “What will you take, then?”

He pauses, examining the slick glisten of salt in the cheap fluorescents. There is no moon, tonight. “A good deal more than nothing, I should think.”

They are silent until the second basket arrives.

 

 

The next night she waits for him naked under her yellow cotton duvet.

If he’s going to take her, she thinks, she can at least start it, control the direction the river runs, hold on to some of herself.

The book taunts her from the foot of the bed. She kicks it off with her big toe.

He doesn’t come.

 

 

Seven nights.

She stares at her empty homework. The lamp hurts her eyes.

Tink, tink. A hollow knock, like a bell with no clapper, sounds on her window. She pads to it barefoot, silent on the rough texture of the carpet. He is on the other side, and she opens it, blood rushing, and if she’s not lying, excitement pooling in her belly.

“I don’t want you afraid,” he says.

“I’m not.”

His face softens. “I want you to want me.”

“I do.”

“Then, Rose Marion Tyler, may I come in?”

She chews her bottom lip until it is pink and slick and he can see the cacophony of veins and arteries beneath the thin skin.

“I wanna know you.”

He blinks at her from his perch outside. “What?”

“…You’ve always been alone, haven’t you?”

The thin line of his mouth is enough. His hesitation is enough.

“Come inside, Doctor.”

When he does, and is as unsure as a boy, she takes his hand.

“C’mere,” she says, tugging him closer.

“Wait, wait.” He has a hand over her sternum, over the butterfly wings of her heart, and it is almost enough for him to curl her body under his and rip into her and feed.

Almost.

“I’m supposed to take you, Rose. You’re not supposed to hold my hand and offer me banana taffy and chips.”

“Those sound disgusting together.”

His mouth twitches. “They do a bit, yeah.”

“How does this work, anyway? M’I gonna be… besotted with you, or somethin’?”

“Something,” and his voice is low and rough, but it doesn’t promise sex or pleasure. It’s an unexpected window into his hurt, and it is a wide window, indeed.

“Come here,” she says again, sitting on the bed and playing with the hem of her jimjams, thumb covering the face of a little green Martian while her index finger twines a thread down to her knuckles.

He watches all of this to intense detail. Hears the blood rush to the pressure of the string on her finger, the rustle of the carpet under her toes, the silence of his suit against his nonexistent heartbeat.

“You’re inviting the devil into your bed,” he whispers.

She juts her chin at him defiantly.

“Prove it.”

 

 

He’s rolling into her mind like the warm winds that shape the storm, sucking the sweat from the whorls of her fingerprints and she’s swimming in the heady mix of him, that cider smell and she’s sinking into cloves and cardamom, the cold outside rises with his hands on her hips so hard they will leave bruises, not human, biting down into her and she’s dizzy with blood loss and colors there, her life fills him and his cock hardens and she’s giggling and dizzy with the warm fire feel of him.

He laughs too, when they come together, a gentle sound to match the lapping waves of their joining, the magic of the fluid they ride together, crests of the ocean and of life and he’s rocking her so gently into sleep.

Despite her fears, she wakes up in the morning, unchanged, still Rose, albeit naked and slightly sticky.

He’s there, with her, face down and completely rumpled under the duvet.

He’s got a mole.

And his heart is beating.

She touches it, softly, a moth in the cage of her hand, and she is afraid to brush the precious dust from its wings. It is strong in his chest.

And now, she knows, she wasn’t lying. She isn’t afraid. When he peers at her from one eye bleary with sleep, his grin wild and unabashed and most definitely spelling trouble, she thinks for the first time in a long time, he isn’t either.


End file.
